Western Outlands

The Western Outlands (Bulgarian: Западните покрайнини) is the Bulgarian name of a region in southeastern Serbia along the border with Bulgaria, which comprises the Serbian municipalities of Tzaribrod (Dimitrovgrad) and Bosilegrad, as well as parts of the municipalities of Pirot, Babušnica and Surdulica. Around 85% of the population of the region is Bulgarian (95% in the Bosilegrad Municipality and 75% in the Tzaribrod (Dimitrovgrad) Municipality) with the remainder being for the most part composed of Serbs.

History

The Treaty of Neuilly

The Western Outlands were part of Bulgaria from the liberation of the country in 1878 until 1919 when they were ceded to Serbia under the Treaty of Neuilly for a period of 20 years. The cession of the region to Serbia was partly a compensation for the occupation of the southern and eastern part of the country by Bulgarian troops in the period between 1915 and 1918 and partly served strategic grounds. The old political boundary between Bulgaria and Serbia followed a chain of high mountain ridges, whereas the new one gave significant military and strategic advantages to the Serbs exposing dangerously the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and thus reducing significantly the military threat for eastern Serbia in case of a new war between the two countries (see also Balkan Wars and World War I).

The Interwar Years

The new border was drawn in 1920 in rather an arbitrary fashion. Some 25 villages were effectively divided with one part left on Bulgarian territory and one on Serbian. Between 1920 and 1941 the population of the region was denied any right to education or church services in Bulgarian and was officially regarded as Serbian by the Yugoslav authorities. Its interests were protected by the Internal Western Outland Revolutionary Organisation (bulg. Вътрешна Западно-Покрайненска Революционна Организация), which engaged in repeated attacks against the Serbian police and army.

In 1939, Yugoslavia refused to cede back the region to Bulgaria under the pretext that its population was actually Serbian. After a brief period of re-occupation by Bulgaria during World War II, the Western Outlands were again ceded to socialist Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito in 1944.

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

The Yugoslav post-war constitution recognised the Bulgarians of the Western Outlands as a minority within Yugoslavia and granted them a wide range of rights including education in mother tongue at the two high schools in Tzaribrod and Bosilegrad. Tzaribrod was renamed in 1946 to Dimitrovgrad in honour of Bulgarian communist leader and chairman of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov.

The tensing of the relations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in 1948, however, led again to a gradual restricting of the rights of the Bulgarian minority in the Western Outlands. Administrative borders were redrawn so as to include parts of the region into purely Serbian municipalities as Pirot and Surdulica, and the all-round education in Bulgarian in 1948 had been reduced to only 3 hours weekly in 1989. A restrictive economic policy left the Western Outlands as one of the poorest and most underdeveloped region of former Yugoslavia which led to a massive migration of the population of the region to Belgrade and Nis and subsequent assimilation into the Serbian majority there. By 1991 the number of the Bulgarians in the Western Outlands had plunged to 25,000 from ca. 60,000 in 1948.

Nowadays

There were repeated cases of violations of the rights of the Bulgarian minority in the Western Outlands during the years of office of Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s. In 1995 and 1996 several thousand Serbian refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were settled in Dimitrovgrad.

The change of regime in Serbia in 2001 and the opening of two Bulgarian cultural and information centres in Dimitrovgrad and Bosilegrad have done little to improve the condition of the Bulgarian minority in the Western Outlands. In 2004, the education in Bulgarian in the high schools in Bosilegrad and Dimitrovgrad was reduced yet again from three to two hours weekly and the Bulgarian minority is currently the only larger minority in Serbia which does not enjoy the right to primary and secondary education in mother tongue (granted to the Hungarians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Turks and Albanians), but only bilingual education with some of the subjects being taught in Bulgarian and some in Serbian.

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History

The Treaty of Neuilly

The Interwar Years

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Nowadays

See also